


On Love

by TerrusDacktellus



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Gen, moody conversations, spike is an idiot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-06
Updated: 2014-12-06
Packaged: 2018-02-28 09:11:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2726840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TerrusDacktellus/pseuds/TerrusDacktellus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Desperate to know if her gradually returning feelings for Xander are real, Dawn asks love's eternal bitch for some advice. A discussion about love between Spike and Dawn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On Love

“Hey, Dawn, you wanna come out tonight? Buff, Wills and I were thinking of hitting up the bar, y’know, a few casual drinks . . . “

Xander’s voice trailed off when he saw Dawn’s expression. 

“Busy tonight?” he asked glumly and she winced. 

“Xander, I’m really sorry, I want to come but I just have this huge test tomorrow - “

“It’s fine. It’s no biggie. Really.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself more than anything else and Dawn felt even worse. She used to be able to take that look off his face. 

“Xander,” Dawn began but the door was already closing and she dropped her head onto the table with a thunk. Ow. Well, if she felt this bad about hurting him, maybe it meant she was starting to get some of her feelings back, right? Or would she feel like this if she let Willow or Giles down? Or Spike? 

The door opened again and she snapped upright hopefully. 

“Hey Bit, is Buffy around?” Spike. Speak of the devil and he shall appear. 

“Don’t you ever knock?” she demanded irritably and then felt bad again as his face fell. 

“Sorry,” he muttered. They’d never really got back to that closeness they’d developed that awful summer after Glory and Buffy - ugh. Today was just one big, miserable train ride to misery town. 

“Spike!” she called after him and he actually paused and looked back at her. Xander should take lessons. 

“Yeah?”

“Can I talk to you for a second? About Xander?”

He gave her that old, warm smile that he seemed to save especially for her and Buffy.

“Sure thing, Li’l Bit. Anything for you.” 

“You know I’m nearly as tall as you are these days,” she said as he sat beside her and he snorted and ruffled her hair. 

“You’ll always be little to me, Dawn.” 

He grinned at her and she grinned back and felt some of that old camaraderie spring back to life. Hey, she’d done something right today after all.

“So what d’you wanna talk about, Niblet? Do I need to crack some skulls? Or one thick skull in particular?” He touched her arm lightly. “He bothering you, pet?”

“No, nothing like that." She hesitated, unsure of how to work her way around to this, then decided to just go for it. Spike had always claimed to prefer the direct approach. "I just, I can’t figure out what’s going on in my head and you always seem so sure of what you’re feeling and I just wondered, when did you know? How did you know?”

He looked utterly baffled. “Know what, love?”

“About Buffy. That she was the one for you, I mean.”

Bafflement gave way to extreme discomfort. “Bit,” he said awkwardly. “Buffy’s not for me, in any way. I don’t have any claim on her.”

“Oh for God’s sake, Spike, that’s not what I meant! How did you know you loved her?!”

“Oh, right,” he muttered. “I had - uh - I had a dream about it, actually.”

Dawn’s eyebrows shot up and she smirked in spite of herself. “A dream? Like a dream dream or a dream dream?” 

He rolled his eyes in disgust. “The way you and your sister use the English language is soddin' ridiculous, you know that? And for the record, it was a perfectly bloody normal dream.” He paused and his face clouded over, remembering. “I dreamed . . . we were fighting. And then we, um, we kissed and I told her I loved her. Then I woke up in a blind fucking panic. S’funny, I knew, even then, that it was the end of me, loving Buffy. The end of the way things were, anyways.” He cleared his throat, glanced at her almost shyly and then looked at his shoes. “But that’s enough about me, yeah? What does this have to do with you and Harris, pet?” 

It was Dawn’s turn to get shy. “I’m starting to . . . have feelings for him again, y’know? But I don’t know if this is the real thing, or if I’m just imagining it because I want to love him again, so badly and if it is the real thing, then I don’t know if it’s the same thing as I felt before and I’m afraid to tell him in case it’s too soon and it doesn’t last or changes and I just don’t know how to tell, Spike!” 

He put a hand on her shoulder and then, very tentatively, slid his arm around her. Dawn froze for a second. He hadn’t touched her like this is years and damn, she’d forgotten just how comfortingly solid he was. She leant towards him, letting him pull her in close against his side and tuck her head into the crook of his neck. They’d spent a lot of time like this, that summer, only there’d been a lot more crying, her tears soaking into his tshirt, his dripping into her hair. 

She sighed into his shoulder. They’d both come a long way since then. “So it was that simple?” she asked finally. “You dreamed about it and then you knew you loved her? I would’ve thought there’d be a long and tortured process of anger and denial and stuff.”

“Yes and no,” he said and she punched him lightly in the stomach. Ow. Yup, still very solid. And unhelpful. 

“Elaborate,” she ordered when he seemed content to leave it like that. 

“I guess I understand what you mean,” he said. “About not knowing whether your feelings are real or not. I mean, you think they’re real, but then time passes and you grow up a bit and you realise that it was all just shallow and superficial and creepy - ” 

He stopped when she pinched him. 

“Bloody violent family,” he complained. “Buffy has this sadistic fascination with breaking my nose, you dig your nails in every chance you get and did you know Joyce hit me over the head with an axe once?”

“Because you were about to kill Buffy,” Dawn pointed out and he let out a martyred sigh. “You were getting side tracked.” 

“Alright, yeah, so maybe the creepy part doesn’t apply to you, Bit, but my point is that what I felt for Buffy back then, it wasn’t real. It was an obsession. A weird, freakish obsession that was bad for both of us.” His voice broke a little. “Especially her.” 

“But it had to get real eventually,” she argued. “I mean, you went and fought for your soul for her.” 

“I suppose,” he murmured glumly but his voice was distant. Dawn twisted to see his face and saw that his eyes were vacant, lost in old self-loathing. Clearly, she wasn’t pinching hard enough. She gave him a good, firm one on the back of the arm and he yelped. 

“Bitch,” he muttered indignantly, but he focused up again, raking his fingers through his hair. “Yeah. It got real.”

“When?” she demanded impatiently. Usually the issue was getting Spike to shut up, but now getting him to talk was like drawing blood from a freaking stone. 

“I don’t know.”

“When you got the soul?”

“I don’t know, Dawn!” 

He stood up abruptly and it occurred to her that he wasn’t just uncomfortable, he was genuinely upset. He paced a little, wandering the kitchen with his hands shoved deep into his pockets. 

“We don’t have to talk about this anymore,” she said eventually, beginning to feel sorry she’d brought it up at all. He just stared at the fridge magnets as though they held some hidden message only he could read. Given that they were mostly cheesy slogans from souvenir shops, she doubted that. 

“It was when it stopped being about me,” he said so quietly that she hardly realised he’d spoken at first. 

“Huh?”

“That was when it got real. When it stopped being about me wanting her so that I could be happy and started being about me just wanting her to be happy. Even if that was without me. Even if that was with someone else.” 

Dawn blinked, panic worming its way into her stomach. 

“I - I don’t know if I ever felt that way about Xander. Oh my God, Spike, what if I never really loved him?!”

“Whoa, whoa, calm down, Bit!” Spike spun and grabbed her arms, holding her still, anchored. “Look, I think you’d be better off talking to someone else about this. Like Willow maybe, or Giles.” He crouched in front of her, his voice was agonisingly gentle. “Me and Buffy - I don’t think we’re a very good example for you an’ Xander.”

She sniffled a little. “Why the hell not? I thought you were love’s eternal bitch. You’re the expert.”

His sympathetic expression was starting to piss her off. “Yeah, the expert in longing for people I can never have. Look, Dawn, the basic difference between the two of us is that you’ve always been Xander’s equal, but I’m never gonna be Buffy’s. She’s the Slayer, I’m a vampire. Beneath her, y’know?” 

They stared at each other. “You’re an idiot,” she said finally and he gave her a forced grin.

“I’ve been told. Talk to Will, okay, Dawn?” She nodded and he rose to leave. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you.” 

Dawn stared, squinty eyed, at the door for a long time after he’d gone. A problem shared was a problem halved, supposedly, but given that she’d gotten a dose of Spike’s problems as part of the exchange, she was only breaking even now. So Spike wasn’t even close to being over Buffy: not news. Any moron who spent two minutes in the same room as him would’ve figured that out. If she hadn’t been so wrapped up in her own drama though, maybe she’d have noticed just how broken up he still was over the whole thing. ‘Beneath her.’ Where the fuck was he getting that from? 

She scrubbed her hands over her face and massaged her temples, then opened her book with a sigh. She couldn’t do anything for Spike, she had no clue how to deal with Xander and her horribly higgledy piggledy feelings for him and this test wasn’t going to study for itself. That last part she could tackle at least.


End file.
